Website for travel agents: itineraries, enquiries and booking engines

en 2026-09-20 7 min read

A travel agent's website costs EUR 900 to 1.500 as a mini-site, EUR 1.500 to 3.500 as a business website with proper itinerary pages and a CMS, and EUR 3.500 to 7.500 once a login, an API, a CRM or payments enter the scope. One trip or one campaign on a single page is EUR 600 to 900.

The question that decides which of those you are buying is whether the site collects enquiries or completes sales. Everything below follows from that one answer.

Itineraries are content, not attachments

One shortcut is to write an itinerary in a document, export it as a PDF and link to it. It is quick, and it costs you the thing you are paying a website for. A PDF cannot be found on its own terms, filtered next to similar trips, corrected in one place when a hotel changes, or linked to a single day, and it has no enquiry form underneath it.

An itinerary as content means a record with fields: destination and region, number of nights, the months it runs, the style of trip, a price from, the day by day, what is included, what is not, the accommodation, a map and a gallery. Once every trip is a record instead of a document, the site can filter them, relate one to another, reuse a day description shared by several trips, and put the right enquiry form under the right trip.

Building that structure is why an itinerary-led site sits at step 03, EUR 1.500 to 3.500, rather than at step 02.

The five steps, and what each one buys a travel business

The same five steps, with what each includes in general terms, are on packages. A fixed quote always follows scoping.

Where a booking engine changes the price

A booking engine is not a button that says book. It is live availability, inventory that can be held, a price calculated rather than typed, money taken online, and a confirmation the traveller can act on. Each is separate work.

• Connecting a supplier, consolidator or channel API, and behaving sensibly when that API is slow or down.
• Caching prices so every search does not hammer the supplier, and deciding how stale a cached price may be before you stop honouring it.
• An admin area where a person corrects what the feed gets wrong, because feeds get things wrong.
• Payments, refunds, cancellation rules, the reconciliation that follows, and a booking record your accountant and your supplier both accept.

That is why a booking engine belongs to step 04 at EUR 3.500 to 7.500, and why a multi-supplier platform with its own accounts, billing and admin is step 05, from EUR 7.500, priced after discovery. It is also why scoping starts by asking whether the supplier you want to connect has a documented API at all. A supplier without one turns an integration into a manual process wearing a costume.

Enquiries are the goal for tailor-made work

If your trips are priced by hand, the site's job is to produce an enquiry you can quote from without a second email. That means a form on each itinerary carrying the trip name, with fields that match the way you quote: travel dates or a month plus how flexible they are, the number of adults and children, the departure city, a budget per person as a band, and the thing that matters most to them.

Behind it sits the plumbing every enquiry needs: where it lands, who gets notified, an automatic reply in your own words, spam protection that does not stop real travellers, and a thank-you page so an enquiry registers as a conversion rather than a guess. A button that says request this trip and opens a pre-filled form is honest. A button that says book now and quietly sends an email is not, and travellers notice.

Process and timeline

Scoping call first, then a fixed quote. Structure and copy next, because an itinerary template is a content decision before it is a design one. Then design, build, content load, your review, and launch with a check that the forms and the analytics are both recording.

A single page is 1 to 2 weeks, a mini-site 2 to 3 weeks, a business website 3 to 6 weeks, an advanced site or web app 6 to 12 weeks. The part that waits on you is the itineraries, because writing one properly takes longer than it looks. Start with the trips you sell rather than the trips you dream about. How the build is put together is on design and engineering and our Next.js page.

When to spend less

If you sell tailor-made trips to returning travellers and referrals, step 02 at EUR 900 to 1.500 with a handful of properly written itineraries beats step 03 filled with thin ones. The job there is credibility and a good enquiry, not a catalogue, and you can add pages later as add-ons at EUR 150 to 250 each without throwing the work away.

Three more ways to keep the number down:

• Do not buy a booking engine for trips you price by hand. It is step 04 money spent on a step 03 problem.
• Take SEO foundation as the one-off it is, EUR 450 to 750: Console, analytics, indexation, technical hygiene, titles, internal links and a 3 to 6 month plan. SEO growth at EUR 500 to 800 a month, with destination and location pages, is for when the foundation is already in place.
• Care at EUR 100 to 300 a month covers updates, monitoring, backups and small fixes. It does not cover a redesign or new features, so a new booking flow is a project rather than a care ticket.

Questions travel buyers ask before signing

Should every itinerary have its own page?

Yes, if you want them found. A page can be titled for the trip, written in its own words, filtered alongside similar trips and linked from a destination page. That is step 03 work, and it is the main reason a travel site costs more than a mini-site.

Can I take a deposit online without a full booking engine?

Yes. It is still payments: step 04 in a new build, or the payments add-on at EUR 600 to 1.500 on your current site, confirmed by the quote. Taking a deposit is simpler than live availability, but it brings a payment provider, refund handling and a record you can reconcile.

Can the site connect to my CRM or my suppliers?

Where there is a documented API, yes: step 04 in a new build, or the integration add-on at EUR 750 to 2.500 on your current site. Scoping is where we find out what the API actually offers, because a CRM that accepts a lead over a webhook is a short job and a supplier system that expects a file dropped in a folder is a different one.

Who owns the site and the itinerary content?

You own the code, the repository and the database, and your itineraries stay yours. Hosting is agreed per project, and the studio can host it. That is settled during scoping.

How many itineraries do I need before launch?

Enough to cover the trips you actually sell and to make the filters worth using. Launch with the itineraries that are written well and add the rest through the CMS, because an empty destination page reads worse than a missing one.

Tell us how your trips are priced and whether money changes hands on the site, and the step becomes obvious. Start at the contact form.